


seasons

by junesangie



Category: ATEEZ (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Normal Life, Ambiguous Relationships, Angst, Autumn, Boys In Love, Break Up, Character Death, Depression, Established Relationship, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Love, M/M, Out of Order, Pain, Pining, Platonic Relationships, Possibly Unrequited Love, References to Depression, Romance, Spring, Suicide, Summer, Winter, platonic ot8
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-07-24
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:08:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25368895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/junesangie/pseuds/junesangie
Summary: eight is such an impermanent number. they know this all too well.eight is beautiful. but it is too fleeting to be good.
Relationships: Choi Jongho & Kim Hongjoong, Choi Jongho/Kim Hongjoong, Choi San/Jung Wooyoung, Jeong Yunho/Song Mingi, Kang Yeosang/Park Seonghwa
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	1. summer

**Author's Note:**

> mars is back! i come bearing something i came up with at 11 p.m. last night and wrote two chapters for. the next ones will be out soon, but for now...enjoy the pain?

“I’m not leaving you.”

Yunho sighs, gritting his teeth, trying to pretend he understands why in hell someone like _Mingi_ would ever want to stay with him. They’re not so different. But he can’t stand how hard it is to accept that somebody loves him like this, and it disgusts him how distant he gets each time Mingi tries to get closer.

He’s not gone. But Jesus, it’s like this is even worse.

“Don’t tell me that I mean something to you,” he pleads. It’s a hoarse whisper; he’s holding back, again, and it makes his lungs burn, again. “Please.”

Mingi can’t get ahold of anything. He’s fighting the tears, for a whole different reason, but fuck if he knows what letting go or holding back will get him. Both are horrible options. Sometimes he wishes it wasn’t Yunho he fell in love with those months ago. Other times he despises himself for believing in such ridiculous nonsense. He loves him. He loves Jeong Yunho. His summertime-grin, his candy-flavored kisses and the laughter that follows him throughout the daytime.

There’s a pause. One neither of them really want to own up to. And Mingi lets a tear slip through his lashes, for the first time in no one knows how long.

“Then don’t act like you love me.”

Yunho’s breath hitches, hooking on the apprehension thickening between their bodies. Between their minds. His heart is clogging, thoughts twisted and knotted and ugly, and he knows Mingi sees him differently.

_Lovely. The most beautiful man I’ve ever seen._

But he can’t have that on his conscience. Not now. Not _ever_.

“You don’t understand, Mingi,” he begins, turning to face him, but by then it’s too late. For anything. For everything he could have said and should have said and would have said if he’d been only a moment too quick.

Tears tracks shine in the sunset’s light, bright red hair tousled and tossed by the breeze as he chokes on the sobs forming in his throat. He swallows them, eats them alive, doesn’t care if they’re rotten or sour because he _deserves_ it, he _deserves this_ and he knows it better than Yunho ever will.

“I understand.” His deep voice wavers, for the first time, out of pain and not of giddiness. Where is his smile? Yunho asks. Why is it gone? “I know that you can’t love me the way I love you.”

“Mingi.”

“I love you, Jeong Yunho.” Hate me, some part of him screams. Push me, punch me, tear me into bits so that I can have _some stupid reason to leave you._ “I hope you can forget about me.”

He smiles, bitter and quavering, through the gloss of tears. And he finds the strength to walk away.

Yunho doesn’t forget him. He never will.


	2. spring

“You’re taking this for granted.”

Seonghwa stops tuning the guitar, and looks Yeosang straight in the eyes. “What?” he asks, plain and simple, as if the answer wasn’t given before the inquiry was made. He can’t help setting the instrument down at this point, because he already feels fingers tightening on the frets and the neck, and he won’t risk ruining this one, too.

“I said what I said.” A hand shoves blond hair away from his forehead, though he knows, pointedly, he isn’t doing it for any particular reason. Just to distract himself. Just to ground the words so it doesn’t blow out of the water.

He’s foolish for thinking the other will take this well. He’s so stupid it makes his head throb with the thought of it all.

A barely-there sigh. The short, dull sound of Seonghwa hopping off the tabletop. Yeosang doesn’t look up from his violin, doesn’t chance meeting his gaze again in fear that anger will greet him instead of the usual curious stare. 

_How can I be so selfish?_ he wonders, silently, disgusted already that he’s said what he has, let alone anything to follow up. 

It’s not his fault. It’s not his fault how hard these past few weeks have been.

But then why did he blame Seonghwa for ignoring this so often?

He already feels the older boy kneeling in front of him, just inches away from crossed legs and worn denim. The fragile peace will break now, he can tell. It’s his fault.

“Yeosangs,” he says, gently, much too kind to be speaking to _him_. The way he adds a single extra letter, one nobody else would ever offer…it’s hard to tell why, but it makes his body tingle and warm like the spitting sparks of a bonfire. 

Even now, the room is cold. Someone is missing.   
  
Someone will always be missing.

A single soft touch lifts his chin, melting eyes meeting molten irises. He can’t stand seeing what’s behind those eyes, because Seonghwa is secretive, he is there to hold and not to be held. But he needs that. He always has, and Yeosang can’t give him that. It’s like a recurring nightmare with the way this chance slips from his grasp, every instant he could be helping turned into one in which he hurts.

“I’m sorry,” comes the reply, immediate and slightly forceful. He can’t look at his face. It’s too close for comfort. “I wasn’t thinking. That was stupid of me to say.” He rests his palm over the hand now cupping his jaw. This isn’t what he thinks it is. It can’t be anything of the sort.

Seonghwa swallows, Adam’s apple bobbing, and drags his hand away. 

  
Yeosang goes back to his violin, fingers trembling from a chill that lingers just a bit too long.

They took it for granted. And now it’s gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's getting a little rough, but hey! i can promise it gets worse :)


	3. autumn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just finished this chapter about a minute ago, and i won't lie, i'm afraid to start writing the final chapter. but i hope you all enjoy. <3

“We can’t keep doing this.”

Exhausted and drained, in every way a person thought or felt possible, San doesn’t resist when Wooyoung forces him onto his other side. The walls swirl. Sunlight filters through the curtains, dust gathering in the shards of broken glow. Washed blankets can’t shake the scent of  _ them  _ any more than it masks the effort not to run.

He smells cotton and Aekyung Spark. Despair and ruination. The days grow colder with each breath, and he wonders, for a moment, if this could have changed. If they could have listened. 

At this rate, San is desperate to forget. His mind has no intention of letting go.

_ Go back, _ his mind screams.  _ Go back, go back, go back. Set your phone’s ringtone so loud it will deafen you when it goes off. Stay up all night, no matter what may happen. Go back.  _

The two of them have been close since their group had formed. Known by a single name, practically joined at the hip while the others teased and joked, telling them to get a room if they were going to be jumping all over each other like this. San wishes—with a deep-set, agonizing pain in his chest—that the world had always been intent on stealing from him. The only person left, the only one that hasn’t become distant and closed-off, is Wooyoung. 

An anchor, San thinks. Tethering him to Earth, tugging him down for the equal weight of both gravity and its opposite to take effect. It never does, and yet they remain, still in the winds of time that don’t heal or change a goddamn thing.

Time leaves wounds. Time leaves scars. It does  _ everything  _ but heal.

“You’re cold,” Wooyoung says now, pulling the smaller-framed young man into his arms, legs locking beneath the sheets as his lover, stiff and reluctant while managing to melt again like water into the only embrace he’s accepted these past nine months. 

“Doesn’t matter.”

No reply. Silence is easier than false assurance. Because he’s right; nothing matters now. Slideshows of the parade down a white road flicker and  _ die _ behind his eyes, heart skipping a single beat as it’s chewed by the teeth he can’t bare the same as before.

Guilt unravels like spools of thread, spilling from his fingertips, taut without a destination, and they all roll for a single person they’ll never find.

Sorry isn’t enough. It’s an illusion mistook for a prayer mistook for a lie.

  
Sorry is bullshit. They’ve said it enough, and look where it’s gotten them.

Eyes pried open, like toothpicks spearing his lids with no intent of being painless, San curls his spine inward again. Tries to breathe right. Tries to slow his heartbeat because it’s too fast and Wooyoung can feel it with his mouth on the pulse point of his neck and that’s just another reason for everyone to handle him like sugar-spun glass. 

He melts in the sunlight. Wooyoung lets him, no inhibitions allowed as they work it out with words or actions, or both. Whatever feels right then, and if that means the difference between sex and tears is blurred and practically lost to definition, does that really matter?

Cocktails of new sprouts and wet earth, hot concrete and spilled lemonade…they’re pointless, irrelevant with the nudge of time, moving ever forward and never making anything  _ better _ . 

Pointless. All of this. Everyone except the boy beside him is a statue, a scarecrow, a sculpture of perfection with eyes holding nothing but ignorance and passive repetition. They’re in the courtyard of their school, surrounded by lifeless human figures, and all he can see is the living, breathing, shivering beauty before him.

San lets himself get lost in those sparkling pools of dying light.

_ Dying. _

Of course.

Everything is always dying. Some things before their time.

Perhaps he should learn to accept that.


	4. winter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i won't say i didn't warn you.

Bitter, stiff and icy, winter crawls in from beneath the pavement with thorny tongues and padded feet, seeping into their shoes, flowing into their bones. Like something coated in the embodiment of loneliness, the flavor of what they could have become echoing in the almost-silence.

“He would have loved this,” Jongho whispers, ignoring the way tears are freezing on his cheeks because isn’t this the way it’s meant to hurt? It’s his fault this all ended, the magic vanishing from fingertips, smiles and laughter and playful understanding between them, all of it gone for his cowardice and inconsistent bravery. If he had any at all.

Driving wouldn’t have helped. He would have walked for any of them. 

There’s no point in imagining that. And yet he can’t help but cling to it as his legs nearly give out beneath him.

Even the top of the hill seems unreal. Like everything from here belongs to someone else, a person they will never meet because they’re one short, the only person who could get them there gone, and their chance is gone now with the rest of their dreams.

He sees Seonghwa, and the way Yeosang is hesitant to hold him upright, reaching for his arm to be sure he doesn’t collapse. A card tower beside the table it rests on. He can’t tell if it’s good or bad.

Wooyoung’s bare fingers are locked with San’s. Puzzle pieces that found one another in this messy, dysfunctional society, a story told without needing the words to say it.

Yunho’s arm around Mingi’s shoulders, offering someplace safe, is foreign to him. What does he know of love? Why didn’t he know sooner?

_Hongjoong,_ he thinks, and the taste it leaves is sickeningly sweet, and he can’t help the way his teeth clench and chest seizes up while the gray sky begins to clear. 

Cowardice, he thinks, has always been his biggest flaw. And now it’s cost a life.

But what exactly do you measure life as? The people you’ve loved, the differences you’ve made? The wealth you acquire throughout life well-lived?

Too fucking soon. He doesn’t want to know what measures your worth or your life because he doesn’t _care_ . That’s honesty he isn’t brave enough to say aloud; facts too blunt to cut easily. Like stabbing someone with a butter knife, over and over, barely thinking about if they’re _dead_ or if they’re alive and you can’t bring yourself to check or care. Blood stains your hands, blood stains everything, and all you see is the damage you’ve done. You don’t snap out of the illusion until everyone tells you what’s happened and that you’ve done nothing wrong but it feels like you have, and god, it kills you knowing what happened that you couldn’t do. Who you couldn’t save all this time, the only person revered enough in such a tight circle that your heart flipped and bent and your guts would furl into themselves around him so often you thought you were sick instead of pining.

Jongho doesn’t want to hear the way people say _I’m so sorry_ like he was a friend and nothing else.

He remembers that he was never anything else.

The taste of fudge and blackberries and edamame. The sound of their own composition, rap and gentle song recorded with what may have been the worst quality tape they had. The concrete beneath them, four walls bouncing back the notations, and something inexplicable he didn’t ever want to explain. Bright blue hair, like homemade dye siphoned from lollipops and cake frosting, decorated the only sight he managed to grasp hold of from across the room.

There was something that day. A striking of flint between their hands, fingers brushing accidentally one too many times reaching for the aux or a new pair of chopsticks as they swapped and mismatched them in the huge pile in the center of their little makeshift picnic, right in the empty warehouse they liked to call their own. 

He’s not worthy of this. And he can tell by the way his stomach roils looking at the empty casket. Watching fingers entwine and tears spill.

Numb. He used to think there wasn’t a single word worse than that.

Like always, he was wrong.

_I’m alone._

And though it’s selfish, and stupid, and absolutely insane, he lets himself feel that. Jongho lets himself feel furious and sick; horrified and lied to. It’s never going to be worth it, so he gives everything the opportunity to course through him, take its course, so he never feels any damn thing ever again.

The flowers he was told two thousand times must have bloomed in his lungs as a child feel wilted. Crumbling. Near death if they haven’t already perished with lack of nourishment.

Breathing is difficult. But he finds himself wandering from the hillside, looking out toward the city not far beyond, praying helplessly that Hongjoong will be waiting, smiling when they return. Upon seeing their faces, he would ask what the matter was, and then laugh at such a ludicrous idea. The pencil-thin lines along his arm would heal. And he wouldn’t be so sad.

It’s a minute before he realizes that Seonghwa and San have taken both his hands in theirs, and began gazing out themselves at the painter’s sight, thinking of nothing else but _him_.

Eyes shut gently, pretty lips parted like always, he hears his eldest friend whisper the name he can’t bring himself to speak.

“ _Hongjoong-ah…_ ” His brows draw up tight, and he’s wincing, _grimacing_ , and Jongo knows the feeling all too well. San is quiet, but the tearstains are a story enough for no questions to be asked. Someone muffles a sob behind them. The world is full of white noise and snow and the unkept promise of _See you tomorrow_.

It rises in his throat like bile. But he doesn’t know how to make this any better than it has been.

_I love you,_ he wants to say. _I love you I love you I love you._ His tongue is heavy, swelling, filling his mouth with something he can’t swallow no matter what the others convince him to do.

And with no more than a docile push, Jongho lets go. Of their hands. Of his love. Of something once just out of reach, and now something more unattainable than the heavens.

He pretends, for a moment, that he’s okay. And for now that’s all he needs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is the first time i've actually finished an entire chaptered work... i hope you all enjoyed it, more or less. i'm very sorry about how sad it was, but in all fairness, sometimes we're just like that.


End file.
